I move the following amendment:
In page 2, line 31 to add "for a period of not less than 10 years".
This amendment is in defence of what I consider to be a very important principle. To clarify the principle involved it is necessary to refer back to the Principal Act of 1960. In that Act we laid down procedure whereby the Authority should appoint its officers permanently. Section 12 (1) sets out:
The Authority shall, as well as appointing the Director-General, appoint such and so many other persons to be officers and servants of the Authority as the Authority from time to time thinks proper, but, subject to subsection (2) of this section, a person shall not be appointed under this section to be an officer of the Authority unless he has been selected by means of a public competition.
That is the general provision. The exception provided under paragraph (ii) referred to is an appointment consisting of the promotion of the person who is already an officer of the Authority.
We have preserved in our statutes an archaic, old-fashioned procedure of description for public servants which is not appropriate to modern conditions. When we speak in a statute of the Oireachtas of an officer of a public authority, we speak really of an established, pensionable employee of a Department of State or of a semi-State body. When we speak of a servant of a Department of State or semi-State body, we refer to an unestablished employee of that body.
The original Act, which came under protracted consideration by the House, determined that any person who was to be appointed a permanent, pensionable employee of the Authority was to be appointed only after he had been selected by means of a public competition, but we made the provision that if somebody had submitted himself to that public competition and had been chosen as a permanent, pensionable servant of the Authority, he was eligible to be transferred from the post in which he already enjoyed permanent, pensionable employment to another post for which he would otherwise have to stand another public competition.
There are innumerable parallels for that procedure in the public service. We are all familiar with the conditions of dispensary doctors. If a person seeks appointment as a dispensary doctor in the local authority health services, he can do so only as a result of an examination open to all qualified persons, on foot of which a recommendation is made by the Local Appointments Commissioners to the local authority which the local authority are bound to act on. But there is an exception.
If a person has already been appointed by public examination as a dispensary doctor in a given county, it is within the discretion of the manager of the local authority of that county to change him from one dispensary to another and it is a common practice that if a young doctor has served well in a relatively poor and difficult dispensary area, if a more satisfactory and attractive dispensary area becomes available within the jurisdiction of the same local authority, he may be transferred to that area and a vacancy declared in respect of the less attractive dispensary post.
It is perfectly true that numerous analogous situations obtain in the public service. Here we have a slightly different situation because we have the peculiar, and somewhat anachronistic, institution there of temporary postmen. Many of us have grown up beside temporary postmen who have been temporary postmen for 30 to 35 years. It is not unseemly, in the very special circumstances obtaining there, where the skill is delivering the post, that if a permanent position arises, there should be a confined examination, confined to persons who have been for many years temporary postmen so that they may go from the category of unpensionable and unestablished public servants to that of pensionable and established public servants as permanent postmen.
We have an analogous situation in the Department of Agriculture. That also has a historical background. When the old Congested Districts Board was established in this country, one of its functions was to provide instruction in the type of agriculture commonly obtaining in the congested areas. In the course of time, with the passage of the Land Acts which were passed when the State was founded, the Congested Districts Board was abolished. All the functions it used to discharge within the congested areas which were appropriate to the Land Commission were transferred to the Land Commission and all the functions it used to discharge in the congested areas which were appropriate to the Department of Agriculture were transferred to the Department of Agriculture, with the result that we acquired in the Department of Agriculture a body of inspectors who were doing work closely analogous to that of a junior inspector of the Department of Agriculture. Owing to the fact that they were originally appointed by the Congested Districts Board, they did not enjoy established status.
In that connection it is important to point out to the House that there was a distinction here because the CDB inspectors were not required to be university graduates in the faculty of agriculture. A junior inspector in the Department of Agriculture was required to have a degree in agriculture. In that case, I am on record as having urged that there should be a confined examination to promote the CDB inspectors, congested area inspectors, to the post of junior inspectors in the Department through a confined examination because they were doing the same work. There I ran up against the problem that the men of the congested areas had not got a degree in agriculture whereas the junior inspectors had to have such a degree. I eventually resolved that problem with the assistance of the then Minister for Finance, who, I think, was Deputy Sweetman, by which we gradually established the CDB men in their own right, because we were prevented from conducting a kind of confined examination which their circumstances would justify by the fact that they did not have a university degree in agriculture.
There are many cases throughout the service in which we seek, for special reasons and in special circumstances, to make straight the path of a long-service employee of a Department to move into a higher grade through a course of preferential treatment in consideration of his long public service. I am not against that recognised procedure but looking at section 4 of the present Bill, one sees an entirely new principle being introduced. It is a very dangerous principle, a very bad principle, because, having laid down in section 12 of the original Act that the Authority must not appoint any person to be an officer of the Authority, unless he has been selected by means of a public competition, we now come along and in section 4 of this Bill propose to make an exception to that rule. It is an exception stated in very peculiar terms. We propose to provide that the Authority shall not appoint any person to be an officer of the Authority unless he has been selected by means of a public examination, unless the appointment consists of the promotion of a person who is already a servant of the Authority, that is to say, an unestablished employee of the Authority in any capacity.
We have to consider what that means. There may be a vacancy in the Radio Éireann Authority or the Television Authority for a junior engineer. Somebody wants to get that post for some particular person. All the existing junior engineers in the service of the Authority are already appointed under the general terms of section 12 of the original Act by public examination, but you pick out the junior engineer you want appointed and appoint him gardener, caretaker or maintenance man, that is, an unestablished servant of the Authority. Remember the Authority can do that without submitting him to any public examination at all and, having put that person in the position of a servant—I am now using the archaic language of our statute—an unestablished employee, you can then publish a notice that a vacancy exists for an engineer who is an established officer of the Authority in Telefís Éireann and that you propose that there shall be a confined examination, confined to persons who are already servants of the Authority, with the result that there is only one candidate. The only candidate, the only maintenance man, the only gardener, the only servant of the Authority who is an engineer is the person to whom you want to give the permanent post. That is the extreme case but that is a bad principle to establish by statute.
I remember very well a case in this country, not so many years ago, in which there was a post to be filled for a local authority, a medical post. I remember that the advertisement appeared and when you came to study the small print of the advertisement, all the customary qualifications were stipulated but there was a new qualification, that the candidate for this post must have a diploma from some obscure pharmaceutical society in London. It transpired that of all the applicants, and there were 20, only one applicant had this diploma of the obscure pharmaceutical society. That was the end of the examination—he got the job.
Now, we are not legislating for today or for tomorrow; we are legislating not only for the Television Authority but for the whole system of public appointments in this country, and the issue here involved is: do we stand over the principle laid down in section 12 of the Act of 1960, which established the Broadcasting Authority, subsection (1) of which says:
The Authority shall, as well as appointing the Director-General, appoint such and so many other persons to be officers and servants of the Authority as the Authority from time to time thinks proper, but, subject to subsection (2) of this section, a person shall not be appointed under this section to be an officer of the Authority unless he has been selected by means of a public competition.
I think we should stand on that principle and should not introduce this highly undesirable qualification.
It has been suggested here that, unless we introduce this qualification, we will exclude from desirable promotion in the future numbers of persons who, in their youth, had not the opportunity to acquire the kind of education which others acquired. Well, none of us, I suppose, will make the case that this new subsection should be used for the purpose of promoting an unqualified person. If he is going to be made an officer of the Authority, we are to assume he has acquired, in the course of his employment as an unestablished employee of the Authority, the qualities requisite for the established post. All my amendment provides is that, when the established post comes to be put up for competition, all the unestablished servants of the Authority will be free to enter for the competition but that anybody outside who wants to enter will be free to do so, too.
Now, some people will make the case: "That seems hard; here is a young fellow who has been seven or eight years, or longer, in the service of the Authority as an unestablished officer. Is he entitled to no preference over an external applicant who, perhaps, has been working with Imperial Chemical Industries, Associated Electrical Industries or some wholly exterior body to the Television Authority?" In principle, there should be no advantage but, in practice, we know that if a man is going for a job in the Television Authority, has been in and out there, knows all the comings and goings and is familiar with all the practices and procedures of Montrose, the headquarters of the Television Authority, or is familiar with all the proceedings and practices of the outside work of the Television Authority, he has—in any examination the Authority may prescribe to qualify an established officer—a very substantial advantage over a person with equal technical qualifications but with no prior experience of service at Montrose.
What we have got to secure, and ensure, in this Bill is that the general exception proposed under section 4 in paragraph (iiA) is made to cover appointments in such a way that it cannot be abused in the future. I direct Deputies' special attention to this, that it cannot be used as a precedent to justify a similar procedure in regard to the whole system which we have painfully established in this country in regard to the appointment of persons to permanent pensionable status in the service of State Departments, local authorities, or semi-State Departments, such as CIE, Bord na Móna, et cetera.
The specific danger against which I seek to make provision here is that, with a special examination for the appointment of an established officer of the Authority in contemplation, some chosen individual will not be made what is technically described as a servant of the Authority, lest the permanent appointment, when it comes to be made, shall be made the subject of a confined examination, confined to existing servants of the Authority, to the exclusion of all others. At the same time, it seems reasonable—on the analogies I have laid before the House as existing in the Department of Posts and Telegraphs, the Department of Agriculture and certain other Departments of State—that the possibility of a confined examination in very special circumstances should not be made impossible. Therefore, my suggestion is that we should add these words to section 4, paragraph (iiA).
That would provide that the Authority, if it contemplates making a permanent pensionable appointment, must hold a public competition, as provided in section 12 of the Principal Act, unless it desires to proceed by way of an appointment consisting of the promotion of a person who is already a servant of the Authority, and as I suggest, for a period of not less than ten years. That would give the Authority a discretion to hold an examination confined to those who were genuinely unestablished, nonpensionable employees of the Authority but who had not been brought in nominally as unestablished, non-pensionable employees, for no other purpose but to give them what would, in effect, be exclusive access to a confined examination, such as was contemplated in subsection (1) of section 12 of the Principal Act of 1960.
I shall not urge on the Minister that ten years is the only period which might with propriety be fixed for the purpose of establishing that a person is genuinely a servant of the Authority, in the technical sense of that word. If the Minister thought some shorter period would provide adequate protection of the fundamental principle I am concerned to preserve, I am quite prepared to meet him on that. But I do urge on him most strenuously that we should not depart from the considered decision of Oireachtas Éireann, as set out in section 12 of the Act of 1960, and that, if we do, we will do it not only to the grave detriment of the Authority itself but to the grave detriment of a principle which has served a most useful purpose in keeping the Civil Service of the State and the civil service of local authorities throughout the country relatively free from the deplorably corrupt practices that disfigured these services during the 19th century.
